WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:19.240 So, about 35 years ago, I got a call one day from a fellow named Jeremy Stone. 00:19.240 --> 00:23.720 And he said, Dennis, I've got a guy here I really want you to meet. 00:23.720 --> 00:28.160 He's an environmentalist, but he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. 00:28.160 --> 00:35.040 And I've been sort of processing this, he's an environmentalist, but he's smart, comment. 00:35.040 --> 00:40.580 And from Jeremy, that was really something of a compliment, a fairly high bar. 00:40.580 --> 00:44.960 For those of you of a certain age, he was I.F. Stone's son, so he spent his youth at 00:44.960 --> 00:50.020 dinner with the leading leftist intellectuals of the Western hemisphere. 00:50.020 --> 00:53.520 And he was then the executive director of something called the Federation of American 00:53.520 --> 00:58.720 Scientists that had 90% of the Nobel Prize winners from the United States on its advisory 00:58.720 --> 00:59.720 board. 00:59.720 --> 01:05.440 So, my expectations in coming over to meet Phil Warburg were relatively high. 01:05.440 --> 01:08.480 And I walked into the room and there's this guy sitting there, it looks like he's about 01:08.480 --> 01:09.880 12 years old. 01:09.880 --> 01:18.000 It was disconcerting, but we got into a conversation and in fact he presented a wealth of knowledge, 01:18.000 --> 01:22.160 presented sort of humbly, and then talked strategically about a series of things that 01:22.160 --> 01:23.160 were really important to me. 01:23.160 --> 01:26.640 He was then working for Senator Percy on energy policy. 01:26.640 --> 01:31.960 I had just taken a role in the Carter administration in energy policy. 01:31.960 --> 01:40.240 And he was, well, those were the days when we had Republicans like John Lindsay, Bill 01:40.240 --> 01:42.840 Ruckelshaus, Dan Evans, Chuck Percy. 01:42.840 --> 01:47.360 I mean, they were very, very different from the kinds of polarized politics that we have 01:47.360 --> 01:49.360 today. 01:49.360 --> 01:53.760 And with guidance from Phil, Percy emerged as, on either side of the aisle, one of the 01:53.760 --> 01:54.960 true energy leaders. 01:54.960 --> 01:59.200 Among other things, he founded the Alliance to Save Energy, which is still arguably dominantly 01:59.200 --> 02:04.480 the top lobbying group on industrial and commercial energy savings in the country. 02:04.480 --> 02:12.360 And sort of from that beginning of kind of being awed by somebody who I was already at 02:12.360 --> 02:18.040 the age that I was clearly capable of having been his father, this guy's career sort of 02:18.040 --> 02:20.480 bounced around in a myriad of directions. 02:20.480 --> 02:26.680 He went on to get his law degree from Harvard, which is the first indication that maybe he 02:26.680 --> 02:30.640 wasn't quite as smart as Jeremy thought he was. 02:30.640 --> 02:35.600 Went off to become a war correspondent in the Middle East. 02:35.600 --> 02:40.000 Ran the largest environmental organization in Israel. 02:40.000 --> 02:43.280 Did a number of projects in Jordan and in Gaza. 02:43.280 --> 02:46.240 Was deeply involved in human rights issues. 02:46.240 --> 02:52.400 And after things got particularly hairy over there, came back and took on the difficult 02:52.400 --> 02:58.520 job of running the Conservation Law Foundation in New England, which is among regional environmental 02:58.520 --> 03:01.720 groups in the United States, the premier organization. 03:01.720 --> 03:05.600 It's the one that other regions, we don't have anything quite like it here. 03:05.600 --> 03:11.080 We have the Northwest Energy Coalition, which does on energy regionally, what CLF does on 03:11.080 --> 03:16.120 energy and toxics and wilderness and roads and what have you. 03:16.120 --> 03:17.600 Just a super group. 03:17.600 --> 03:18.600 Ran that for many years. 03:18.600 --> 03:22.560 Got deeply involved in the Cape Wind Project, which everybody here mostly thinks of in terms 03:22.560 --> 03:26.840 of the hypocrisy of the Kennedy family, but it was another one of these deep things. 03:26.840 --> 03:28.800 He's been involved in nuclear issues. 03:28.800 --> 03:30.760 It's how he cut his teeth on energy. 03:30.760 --> 03:35.640 And in issue after issue after issue, war and peace, human rights, the environment, 03:35.640 --> 03:37.520 sustainability, clean energy. 03:37.520 --> 03:42.680 Phil has brought that same incisive intellect that he displayed that very first meeting 03:42.680 --> 03:45.760 35 years ago. 03:45.760 --> 03:49.360 So when I found out that he was writing a book on wind, I told him I'd love to do anything 03:49.360 --> 03:53.440 that I could to promote it because I knew it would have a message that would be beautifully 03:53.440 --> 03:55.400 crafted and persuasive. 03:55.400 --> 03:56.720 And he's now completed the book. 03:56.720 --> 03:59.160 He's here and delighted to introduce him to you. 03:59.160 --> 04:02.640 Phil Warburg. 04:02.640 --> 04:08.800 I want to talk about wind power tonight as a way to address three of the most critical 04:08.800 --> 04:11.880 issues that we face in America today. 04:11.880 --> 04:15.240 One of them is our lagging economy. 04:15.240 --> 04:18.880 Wind power is a gateway to lots of American jobs. 04:18.880 --> 04:24.520 And I'll come back to describe some of those jobs as we move through this discussion. 04:24.520 --> 04:29.760 But they're well-paying jobs and they're often jobs in remote areas where employment 04:29.760 --> 04:34.640 is especially hard to come by. 04:34.640 --> 04:38.680 The second issue is energy independence. 04:38.680 --> 04:43.840 We get 45% of our oil today from foreign sources. 04:43.840 --> 04:49.720 The good news is that's down from 60%, which was the percentage in 2005. 04:49.720 --> 04:54.960 The bad news is that's still a staggering dependence upon a foreign energy resource. 04:54.960 --> 05:00.880 And wind power can help us move away from that dependence upon foreign energy resources. 05:00.880 --> 05:04.840 And I'll talk a little bit about how that's the case. 05:04.840 --> 05:09.320 And the third issue that wind power helps us address is climate change. 05:09.320 --> 05:15.720 I think of climate change as the Lord Voldemort of environmental issues in Washington. 05:15.720 --> 05:22.500 It's the issue that can't be named because the fossil and nuclear fuel lobby is so powerful 05:22.500 --> 05:28.000 in scaring Congress people away from even beginning to talk about climate change and 05:28.000 --> 05:30.760 what we might do about it on a national level. 05:30.760 --> 05:34.620 But it's an issue that we can't afford to ignore. 05:34.620 --> 05:36.720 Global temperatures are rising. 05:36.720 --> 05:38.860 Sea levels are rising. 05:38.860 --> 05:40.880 Winds are acidifying. 05:40.880 --> 05:42.840 Storm activity is increasing and intensifying. 05:42.840 --> 05:50.320 I'm not sure what it will take to wake up the nation and more particularly our nation's 05:50.320 --> 05:58.200 sensible leaders to how important and how crucial this issue is to address. 05:58.200 --> 06:03.700 Wind power can help us begin to move in the right direction on that issue as well. 06:03.700 --> 06:11.960 So how big a role can we expect wind power to play as we move toward the future? 06:11.960 --> 06:16.720 Well, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the successor to the Solar Energy Research 06:16.720 --> 06:25.720 Institute produced this map showing the different levels of wind that are available across the 06:25.720 --> 06:26.720 nation. 06:26.720 --> 06:31.280 As you can see from the purple area stretching down from the Dakotas in the north on through 06:31.280 --> 06:33.220 Texas in the south. 06:33.220 --> 06:36.120 That is our area of greatest wind resources. 06:36.120 --> 06:41.000 However, we have super abundant wind resources across much of the nation. 06:41.000 --> 06:47.160 So much so that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates we could be getting 10 06:47.160 --> 06:56.200 times our current total power needs from land-based sources alone and from abundant wind areas 06:56.200 --> 06:57.200 alone. 06:57.200 --> 07:01.880 If you throw offshore wind resources into the mix, that multiplier goes up to about 07:01.880 --> 07:05.000 14 times our current power supply. 07:05.000 --> 07:07.340 I have to be careful when I throw out those numbers. 07:07.340 --> 07:13.160 In Chicago, I made a similar statement and I was quoted as you can see saying, author 07:13.160 --> 07:18.640 Philip Warburg says, America can increase electric power 10 times with wind. 07:18.640 --> 07:22.560 Needless to say as an environmentalist, my goal in life is not to get America to increase 07:22.560 --> 07:26.060 its total power use by 10 times or in fact at all. 07:26.060 --> 07:33.120 But it's to say that we can really turn to wind as a very significant power provider, 07:33.120 --> 07:37.660 much more so than we are today even though we're making a good start today. 07:37.660 --> 07:39.000 So what can we expect? 07:39.000 --> 07:43.940 I talked about what the overall potential is, but what can we expect in the next few decades 07:43.940 --> 07:49.880 if we were really to commit ourselves to developing wind power as a resource? 07:49.880 --> 07:55.660 The Department of Energy under George Bush interestingly in 2008 came out with a study 07:55.660 --> 08:01.520 called Wind Powering America 20% by 2030. 08:01.520 --> 08:08.280 And that study as its title suggests charts out a course to get us to be a fifth reliant 08:08.280 --> 08:13.400 upon wind for our power needs by 2030, within two decades. 08:13.400 --> 08:18.320 The National Renewable Energy Laboratory more recently has come out with a renewable electricity 08:18.320 --> 08:19.860 futures study. 08:19.860 --> 08:26.700 And that study projects that wind and solar alone using technology that is commercially 08:26.700 --> 08:31.840 available today could be providing half of our total power needs by the middle of this 08:31.840 --> 08:32.840 century. 08:32.840 --> 08:38.360 So we're not talking about some exotic hypothetical energy resource that we could have someday. 08:38.360 --> 08:43.400 We're talking about a resource that is at hand and that could really be making a huge 08:43.400 --> 08:49.000 dent in our fossil fuel emissions and our reliance upon nuclear energy. 08:49.000 --> 08:54.840 So, our use of wind power is by no means new. 08:54.840 --> 09:01.920 Going back to colonial times, we used the wind to saw wood, to grind grain, to pump 09:01.920 --> 09:03.140 water. 09:03.140 --> 09:09.720 And in fact, water pumping windmills like this one were used to open up vast stretches 09:09.720 --> 09:15.180 of farmland and ranch land across the Midwest and the West in the late 19th century. 09:15.180 --> 09:18.760 Hundreds of thousands of these were used at that time. 09:18.760 --> 09:24.880 And we often think about the railroads as opening up the West, which is in part true. 09:24.880 --> 09:30.520 But I think we underrate the very, very important role that wind power in fact played in opening 09:30.520 --> 09:32.040 up the West. 09:32.040 --> 09:38.320 We've also used wind power for quite some time to generate electricity, not abundant 09:38.320 --> 09:40.020 amounts of electricity. 09:40.020 --> 09:42.020 This is called a wind charger. 09:42.020 --> 09:49.400 And it was used quite widely on farmsteads across the country in the 20s, 30s, and even 09:49.400 --> 09:54.880 into the 40s a bit in areas that had not yet been reached by rural electrification. 09:54.880 --> 10:01.060 As you can tell by the design and by the 12 volt battery at the bottom, we're not exactly 10:01.060 --> 10:04.000 talking about a huge power supply. 10:04.000 --> 10:07.940 But it was enough to get a trickle of electricity into these households, to light some light 10:07.940 --> 10:16.240 bulbs and perhaps more significantly to open up the radio airwaves to farmers and ranchers 10:16.240 --> 10:23.200 who until that point had been isolated from that 20th century communications medium. 10:23.200 --> 10:30.160 The anecdotal use of wind power to keep a few farmsteads lit and connected to the world 10:30.160 --> 10:35.720 was obviously no match for the very large scale wind projects that developed in the 10:35.720 --> 10:39.600 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s in the United States. 10:39.600 --> 10:42.880 Hydro dams like the Hoover Dam, I actually just visited the Hoover Dam for the first 10:42.880 --> 10:45.440 time last week. 10:45.440 --> 10:51.600 Huge coal plants, oil plants and the like, generating lots of electricity, seemingly 10:51.600 --> 10:54.200 without grave side effects. 10:54.200 --> 11:00.760 We've only come more recently to realize just how misguided our over reliance on those technologies 11:00.760 --> 11:01.760 are. 11:01.760 --> 11:05.000 I'm not talking about hydro, I'm talking about the coal and the oil. 11:05.000 --> 11:11.440 And in fact, what happened in the 1950s was in many ways more disturbing and that was 11:11.440 --> 11:20.040 we had a technology that was a war technology that utterly devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 11:20.040 --> 11:26.200 And there was a feverish attempt to come up with some way to create uses for the peaceful 11:26.200 --> 11:27.240 atom. 11:27.240 --> 11:32.280 So we began to generate nuclear power vastly subsidized by the federal government through 11:32.280 --> 11:38.800 research and development and through a liability cap on nuclear accidents that without which 11:38.800 --> 11:41.680 nuclear power would never have gone anywhere. 11:41.680 --> 11:51.040 And all of this really pushed renewable energy to the side until the 1970s. 11:51.040 --> 11:55.300 Two events really happened or two phenomena really happened during the 1970s. 11:55.300 --> 11:59.840 The first which we've talked about a little bit was Earth Day 1970s. 11:59.840 --> 12:04.560 You may recognize the person in this photograph, he's in this room. 12:04.560 --> 12:10.000 And the growth in environmental awareness and the sense that well there might not be 12:10.000 --> 12:14.400 the free lunch that we thought there was in terms of burning fossil fuels and relying 12:14.400 --> 12:16.200 upon nuclear power. 12:16.200 --> 12:21.120 And then the second major event was the Arab oil embargo of 1973. 12:21.120 --> 12:27.320 And at that point with gas lines stretching around blocks and people becoming quite alarmed 12:27.320 --> 12:31.920 at the first experience in their lifetimes, most of them unless they lived through World 12:31.920 --> 12:37.260 War II of energy shortage, people began to say well you know we better really try to 12:37.260 --> 12:39.800 figure out what to do about this. 12:39.800 --> 12:47.600 And it was actually Richard Nixon who in 1974 in the waning days of his presidency proclaimed 12:47.600 --> 12:52.080 a new initiative called Project Independence. 12:52.080 --> 12:58.920 Now this Project Independence was targeted at making America 100% independent of foreign 12:58.920 --> 13:02.560 energy resources by 1980. 13:02.560 --> 13:06.280 Needless to say that target was far from met. 13:06.280 --> 13:11.480 And he was really talking about developing coal in the west, opening up federal lands 13:11.480 --> 13:16.840 for drilling oil and gas, that might sound like a recent Republican candidate for the 13:16.840 --> 13:19.800 presidency. 13:19.800 --> 13:24.560 And expediting nuclear power plant licensing. 13:24.560 --> 13:30.040 Solar was mentioned very briefly and as a distant prospect and wind wasn't mentioned 13:30.040 --> 13:31.040 at all. 13:31.040 --> 13:36.680 But at least Nixon was waking up to the challenge of how do we move toward a more energy independent 13:36.680 --> 13:39.520 America. 13:39.520 --> 13:45.200 It was really Jimmy Carter who was the first president to put renewable energy squarely 13:45.200 --> 13:48.920 on the national political agenda. 13:48.920 --> 13:56.400 Very early in his term he called for an energy plan that would get us to 20% reliance on 13:56.400 --> 13:58.960 renewable energy by the year 2000. 13:58.960 --> 14:01.960 Needless to say we didn't meet that target. 14:01.960 --> 14:07.840 But Carter was earnest in, no one would accuse Carter of being anything but earnest. 14:07.840 --> 14:14.120 He was earnest in trying to lay out a plan that just might get us there. 14:14.120 --> 14:21.500 And that plan included new laws that provided a way for independent power producers, including 14:21.500 --> 14:27.600 producers of electricity from wind and solar and other renewable resources, to sell their 14:27.600 --> 14:31.360 power to electric utilities for the first time. 14:31.360 --> 14:35.740 He also vastly expanded the renewable energy research and development budget, created the 14:35.740 --> 14:44.520 solar energy research institute, and promoted federal tax incentives for wind energy, solar 14:44.520 --> 14:47.760 energy and other renewable energy developers. 14:47.760 --> 14:55.040 Symbolically, but importantly, he installed solar panels on the roof of the White House 14:55.040 --> 15:01.960 as a gesture in the right direction. 15:01.960 --> 15:06.520 Jimmy Carter's aspirations were more impressive than his mode of delivery. 15:06.520 --> 15:11.880 I can tell that at least some people recognize this sweater. 15:11.880 --> 15:17.720 In February of 1977, just a month after being elected, he delivered what has now become 15:17.720 --> 15:20.020 known as the sweater speech. 15:20.020 --> 15:26.620 He sat beside a roaring fireplace in the White House wearing this sweater and counseled 15:26.620 --> 15:33.200 America on how we could move to a brighter, happier energy future. 15:33.200 --> 15:36.000 Unfortunately, his recipe was not exactly a winning one. 15:36.000 --> 15:42.040 He proposed that we all turn our thermostats down to 65 degrees during the daytime and 15:42.040 --> 15:46.080 a bone chilling 55 degrees at night. 15:46.080 --> 15:49.000 Needless to say, this didn't go over terribly well. 15:49.000 --> 15:57.860 But it showed his seriousness in helping Americans begin to think about how we could achieve 15:57.860 --> 16:06.720 a level of comfort without relying upon the fossil fuels that we had been so accustomed 16:06.720 --> 16:09.680 to relying upon for so long. 16:09.680 --> 16:13.400 Then came Ronald Reagan. 16:13.400 --> 16:21.880 When he rode into town in 1981, he lacerated Carter for promoting what he called the sharing 16:21.880 --> 16:23.400 of austerity. 16:23.400 --> 16:27.680 He blamed him for our disintegrating economy. 16:27.680 --> 16:34.320 He really returned America to a approach to energy development, which we've come to associate 16:34.320 --> 16:39.460 with Sarah Palin, a kind of baby drill mentality. 16:39.460 --> 16:47.200 He pushed for the expedited extraction of gas and oil and coal. 16:47.200 --> 16:51.000 He was an ardent proponent of nuclear energy. 16:51.000 --> 16:57.240 In a kind of negative, cynical, symbolic gesture, he stripped the panels off of the White House 16:57.240 --> 16:59.400 roof. 16:59.400 --> 17:06.560 He also dismantled the energy incentives that made it possible for wind energy, solar energy, 17:06.560 --> 17:11.480 and other renewable technologies to begin to compete with fossil and nuclear fuels. 17:11.480 --> 17:18.480 So predictably, by the mid 1980s, the wind movement went from boom to bust. 17:18.480 --> 17:23.320 There was another significant factor there, and that was the deregulation of natural gas. 17:23.320 --> 17:29.360 But Ronald Reagan really set a very negative tone, and he backed that tone by stripping 17:29.360 --> 17:34.800 away research and development funding for renewable energy. 17:34.800 --> 17:38.600 Dennis can tell you a lot about that. 17:38.600 --> 17:43.400 And really moved us away from the kind of future that Jimmy Carter hoped we would be 17:43.400 --> 17:44.880 moving toward. 17:44.880 --> 17:48.160 Thankfully, wind power is back on track today. 17:48.160 --> 17:53.880 During the first four years of the Obama administration, we doubled our reliance upon wind power. 17:53.880 --> 17:58.140 We get about 4% of our total power needs from wind today. 17:58.140 --> 18:04.260 And that's enough to provide the power needs for about 13 million American households. 18:04.260 --> 18:06.640 Some states, however, are way ahead of that curve. 18:06.640 --> 18:09.560 South Dakota gets 22% of its power from wind. 18:09.560 --> 18:13.400 Iowa generates about 20% of its power from wind. 18:13.400 --> 18:17.740 Even Texas, which we think of as the big oil state, and which by the way is the largest 18:17.740 --> 18:24.680 power consumer in the country, despite not having the largest population, gets about 18:24.680 --> 18:26.520 7% of its power from wind. 18:26.520 --> 18:31.960 That is actually a staggering number to consider when you're thinking about this technology 18:31.960 --> 18:36.920 is one that until a few years ago we really hadn't heard very much about. 18:36.920 --> 18:42.160 We have a long way to go, but we're definitely heading in the right direction. 18:42.160 --> 18:47.880 Beyond generating a lot of power, a lot more could come, but a lot of power, wind power 18:47.880 --> 18:49.720 also creates jobs. 18:49.720 --> 18:53.400 And it creates jobs in the manufacturing sector, for example. 18:53.400 --> 19:00.120 About 75,000 people are right now employed by the wind industry directly or indirectly. 19:00.120 --> 19:02.560 Many of those are in the manufacturing sector. 19:02.560 --> 19:06.280 And what has happened in the manufacturing sector is actually quite interesting. 19:06.280 --> 19:11.080 We've all been reading in the press lots of coverage of how the Chinese are eating our 19:11.080 --> 19:16.520 renewable energy lunch in the manufacture of renewable energy technology. 19:16.520 --> 19:21.200 And that in fact is not really the case with regard to wind. 19:21.200 --> 19:27.520 China is the largest producer of wind technology, but almost all of that technology is still 19:27.520 --> 19:29.440 used in China. 19:29.440 --> 19:31.320 It's not true of its solar technology. 19:31.320 --> 19:36.880 95% of the panels that are produced in China are exported from China. 19:36.880 --> 19:40.400 But wind turbines are a different story. 19:40.400 --> 19:47.160 The average wind turbine that is put up on American soil today, about two-thirds of its 19:47.160 --> 19:49.440 value is American-made. 19:49.440 --> 19:54.680 And that percentage has gone up very significantly from five years ago when about a third of 19:54.680 --> 19:56.640 the value of that turbine was American-made. 19:56.640 --> 20:00.200 So we're definitely heading in the right direction. 20:00.200 --> 20:06.240 But beyond generating jobs in the manufacturing sector, and I should mention, by the way, 20:06.240 --> 20:16.640 that our overall expectation for job creation by wind power, if we were to follow the 2008 20:16.640 --> 20:21.120 plan put out by the Department of Energy, would get us beyond a quarter of a million 20:21.120 --> 20:28.000 jobs in the wind energy sector as we approach that 2030 goal of producing a fifth of our 20:28.000 --> 20:31.480 power from wind by that date. 20:31.480 --> 20:37.840 Jobs in the manufacturing sector, jobs in construction of wind farms, and jobs in the 20:37.840 --> 20:41.160 operation and maintenance of wind farms. 20:41.160 --> 20:47.240 Again, I can't see you, but what is the tallest ladder any of you have climbed? 20:47.240 --> 20:48.240 20 feet. 20:48.240 --> 20:49.240 20 feet. 20:49.240 --> 20:50.240 Okay. 20:50.240 --> 20:56.840 So wind technicians on a daily basis, and sometimes three or four times a day, have 20:56.840 --> 21:04.000 to climb a 270-foot ladder to get to the mechanical operations room of a typical wind turbine. 21:04.000 --> 21:08.200 Some turbines today have small elevators, but a lot of them still do not. 21:08.200 --> 21:15.120 So it takes a robust physique, and frankly, also someone who's not averse to enclosed 21:15.120 --> 21:17.080 spaces. 21:17.080 --> 21:22.520 I actually tried to climb a wind turbine, and I do not love enclosed spaces, and I wouldn't 21:22.520 --> 21:25.240 exactly describe myself as robust. 21:25.240 --> 21:30.280 I made it to about 70 feet, and then decided I'd probably had enough. 21:30.280 --> 21:35.760 I was taken to this wind turbine by a two-time Iraqi veteran, and I was a little afraid of 21:35.760 --> 21:40.560 the dressing down I was going to get when I came down from my failed climb. 21:40.560 --> 21:45.720 He was actually quite kind to me, and I related to him what my two daughters said to me when 21:45.720 --> 21:48.760 they heard I was planning on climbing a wind turbine. 21:48.760 --> 21:51.800 One of them said, well, of course you have to try to do it. 21:51.800 --> 21:53.760 You're writing a book about wind. 21:53.760 --> 21:59.780 And the other, who's a kind gentle type, said, you've got to be out of your mind. 21:59.780 --> 22:01.880 You shouldn't do that. 22:01.880 --> 22:07.120 They were both right in a way. 22:07.120 --> 22:11.640 I want to say a few words about my book, Harvest the Wind. 22:11.640 --> 22:18.120 Its subtitle, America's Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability, is the 22:18.120 --> 22:19.560 big picture story. 22:19.560 --> 22:23.680 But there's another journey that this book really involved, and it was a personal journey 22:23.680 --> 22:28.120 that I took far from my native New England. 22:28.120 --> 22:35.600 As Dennis alluded to, the Cape Wind offshore wind farm was a major challenge for me when 22:35.600 --> 22:38.740 I headed up the Conservation Law Foundation. 22:38.740 --> 22:46.560 New Englanders like to think of ourselves as a light unto the nation, so to speak, environmentally 22:46.560 --> 22:50.320 progressive and moving ahead of the curve. 22:50.320 --> 22:57.480 And it frankly shocked me how much resistance there was to the Cape Wind offshore wind farm. 22:57.480 --> 23:07.240 Now, this is a wind farm whose closest landfall is about five miles from the outermost turbine. 23:07.240 --> 23:11.160 And that would mean that if you were to hold your arm at full arm's length, the nearest 23:11.160 --> 23:14.040 turbine would be about the size of your thumbnail. 23:14.040 --> 23:17.480 So we're not exactly talking about something that is in your face. 23:17.480 --> 23:24.640 Yet that was too much of a visual insult for many well-heeled New England vacationers, 23:24.640 --> 23:26.640 including sadly Ted Kennedy. 23:26.640 --> 23:31.560 Ted Kennedy, who was really a leader of pushing for the right kinds of energy policies over 23:31.560 --> 23:33.100 several decades. 23:33.100 --> 23:37.640 But when it came to the thought of looking at an offshore wind farm from the Hyannis 23:37.640 --> 23:43.320 Port family compound, some other set of values kicked into play. 23:43.320 --> 23:50.720 And he was very determined to stop this wind farm and actually work behind closed doors 23:50.720 --> 23:55.920 in Congress, as well as being public in his opposition to this wind farm. 23:55.920 --> 24:04.040 It was really my frustration and embarrassment, frankly, with our inability to move wind power 24:04.040 --> 24:09.360 forward on a scale that could make a difference in New England that sent me to far-flung corners 24:09.360 --> 24:12.240 of the nation, the red states. 24:12.240 --> 24:19.520 And Cloud County, Kansas was one of my first stops. 24:19.520 --> 24:25.060 Cloud County, Kansas is located about 140 miles north of Salina. 24:25.060 --> 24:26.880 It is a very remote county. 24:26.880 --> 24:32.360 It was settled in the late 1800s when the Kansas Pacific Railroad rolled through. 24:32.360 --> 24:39.520 Its population peaked around 1910, and it's been in decline ever since. 24:39.520 --> 24:47.080 So much so that one local commentator observed, it used to be that you could commit suicide 24:47.080 --> 24:50.760 by laying down in the middle of Main Street on a Saturday. 24:50.760 --> 24:56.240 The problem was you wouldn't die until Monday because there were so few cars. 24:56.240 --> 25:01.400 The person who made that comment was Kirk Lowell, and he is the head of the Cloud County 25:01.400 --> 25:05.580 Economic Development Agency, otherwise known as Cloud Corp. 25:05.580 --> 25:11.720 And Kirk is an avid wind booster because he sees the jobs that it brings to Cloud County, 25:11.720 --> 25:14.420 because he sees the economic development that it brings. 25:14.420 --> 25:16.820 He does not talk about climate change. 25:16.820 --> 25:19.200 Climate change is, again, that taboo subject. 25:19.200 --> 25:21.640 He does talk about energy independence. 25:21.640 --> 25:27.360 He's seen many Kansans go off to fight wars in the Middle East that he sees as being fought 25:27.360 --> 25:33.240 at least substantially over our super dependence upon foreign energy resources, and he wants 25:33.240 --> 25:37.440 to see that decline. 25:37.440 --> 25:40.960 He again doesn't mince words in how he phrases things. 25:40.960 --> 25:45.480 What he said to me was, either we'll have to put wind turbines on our Kansas prairie 25:45.480 --> 25:50.220 or we'll have to continue burying our fine young men and women under it. 25:50.220 --> 25:58.520 The Meridian Way Wind Farm went into operation in December of 2008, and it has 67 turbines. 25:58.520 --> 26:05.320 Those 67 turbines generate enough electricity for 55,000 Kansas and Missouri households. 26:05.320 --> 26:10.480 About 300 jobs were created during the construction of this wind farm, many of them local, and 26:10.480 --> 26:15.060 dozens of jobs are involved in the ongoing operation and maintenance of the wind farm. 26:15.060 --> 26:22.240 So it's a great economic boon to the area in terms of jobs, but perhaps the most remarkable 26:22.240 --> 26:27.960 thing that happened in Cloud County took place at Cloud County Community College. 26:27.960 --> 26:33.560 Cloud County Community College in 2007 made a strategic bet on wind. 26:33.560 --> 26:39.240 It created a wind technology training program, and it appointed this man, Bruce Graham, a 26:39.240 --> 26:42.800 former high school science teacher to head up the program. 26:42.800 --> 26:48.740 At the time, there were about five students who were interested in the program, so the 26:48.740 --> 26:53.880 college administrators leased out a little bit of classroom space sandwiched between 26:53.880 --> 26:59.000 a pawn shop and a Chinese restaurant in the local shopping mall, and they set Bruce on 26:59.000 --> 27:00.000 his way. 27:00.000 --> 27:05.600 Well, today, there are over 100 students enrolled in this program, and as you can see from this 27:05.600 --> 27:15.280 photograph, they're not all fresh scrub kids fresh off the farm, they're former army careerists, 27:15.280 --> 27:21.240 they're school teachers, they're office administrators, they're refugees from the construction trades, 27:21.240 --> 27:26.160 all eager to get in on the ground floor of an exciting technology that they see as really 27:26.160 --> 27:29.040 paving our way to the 21st century. 27:29.040 --> 27:35.360 But it's not just the jobs and the job training that have resulted from the Meridian Way Wind 27:35.360 --> 27:38.480 Program and Cloud County's commitment to wind. 27:38.480 --> 27:44.000 The farmers and the ranchers are also very significant beneficiaries, people like Kurt 27:44.000 --> 27:45.960 Core and his mother, Helen. 27:45.960 --> 27:52.600 I like to consider this photograph my tribute to Grant Wood's American Gothic. 27:52.600 --> 27:58.400 The Cores have been farming and ranching in Cloud County since the 1880s, and they get 27:58.400 --> 28:04.000 tens of thousands of dollars in annual lease payments from the wind developer. 28:04.000 --> 28:09.520 There are dozens of other families like them in Cloud County, and it's a great hedge in 28:09.520 --> 28:14.680 their view against the ups and downs in cattle and grain prices and the uncertainties of 28:14.680 --> 28:15.680 Midwestern weather. 28:15.680 --> 28:22.920 We've all read about and perhaps experienced the horrible drought of this past summer. 28:22.920 --> 28:27.640 The wind farm continues to generate power and continues to pay those lease payments 28:27.640 --> 28:30.560 to farmers and ranchers like the Cores. 28:30.560 --> 28:34.040 Kurt has two sons who are now in college, and he's very hopeful that at least one of 28:34.040 --> 28:37.080 them will come back to run the family farm. 28:37.080 --> 28:43.360 He feels that the guaranteed annuity that the wind farm developer pays over the next 28:43.360 --> 28:50.800 25 years and maybe beyond that will be a major draw to bring perhaps one, perhaps two of 28:50.800 --> 28:53.000 his sons back to the farm. 28:53.000 --> 28:59.880 I don't want to paint an unqualifiedly rosy picture of how wind power is received, even 28:59.880 --> 29:01.600 in a place like Kansas. 29:01.600 --> 29:04.840 I went to another part of the state called the Flint Hills. 29:04.840 --> 29:10.360 The Flint Hills is a stretch of tall grass prairie covering about 11,000 square miles. 29:10.360 --> 29:12.120 It's a very large area. 29:12.120 --> 29:19.120 It's the last large remaining stretch of untrammeled tall grass prairie, and there are cow men 29:19.120 --> 29:25.480 and cow women who live in the Flint Hills who are dead set against seeing vertical wind 29:25.480 --> 29:29.660 towers imposed upon their very horizontal horizon. 29:29.660 --> 29:34.720 One of those opponents, and really one of the ringleaders, is a woman named Rose Bacon. 29:34.720 --> 29:40.240 Rose actually grew up in Iowa, but she came to the Flint Hills when she was 11 years old 29:40.240 --> 29:45.200 with her father to buy cattle, and she fell in love with the place. 29:45.200 --> 29:49.400 Took a long time to get back there, but 20 years ago bought a farm and a ranch in the 29:49.400 --> 29:55.240 Flint Hills, and together with her husband Kent, a Vietnam War veteran, set up a cattle 29:55.240 --> 29:56.240 operation. 29:56.240 --> 30:02.400 I mentioned that Kent has a prosthetic leg that is especially bowed so that he can actually 30:02.400 --> 30:05.200 sit on a horse and herd cattle. 30:05.200 --> 30:13.040 They're devoted to the ranching tradition, and they are adamant opponents of wind power. 30:13.040 --> 30:17.840 Rose puts it in pretty unsparing terms when she talks about wind power. 30:17.840 --> 30:21.040 She calls it a rape of the landscape. 30:21.040 --> 30:25.560 Somewhat more temperate in his description of wind farms is Bill Browning. 30:25.560 --> 30:30.700 Bill Browning is the guy in the white t-shirt on the left, and he is a physician as well 30:30.700 --> 30:33.720 as a multi-generational rancher. 30:33.720 --> 30:38.200 Here's how he describes what he thinks wind power would do to the Flint Hills. 30:38.200 --> 30:43.440 The beauty of the Flint Hills for me is where the hills meet the sky morning and evening, 30:43.440 --> 30:48.320 and the shadows come across the hills and make all the contours stand out. 30:48.320 --> 30:54.920 If you're going to put a string of 400-foot steel behemoths across the horizon, it's gone. 30:54.920 --> 30:59.800 The loneliness, the emptiness, the absence of the intrusions of people, all that would 30:59.800 --> 31:01.800 be lost. 31:01.800 --> 31:06.240 Rose and Bill and the people who are working with them to oppose wind power in the Flint 31:06.240 --> 31:12.200 Hills will never forgive Pete Farrell for opening up his ranch to wind development about a decade 31:12.200 --> 31:13.520 ago. 31:13.520 --> 31:18.760 Pete decided that he felt it was time to move beyond fossil fuels. 31:18.760 --> 31:24.580 He also saw the economic benefits of building a wind farm, and he solicited wind developers 31:24.580 --> 31:28.680 to come to his ranch and develop a project. 31:28.680 --> 31:35.080 At the time, I don't think he had a clue how vehement the opposition was going to be. 31:35.080 --> 31:40.160 Once he pressed ahead, here's how he described what the situation was. 31:40.160 --> 31:42.920 We had TV cameras in the courtrooms. 31:42.920 --> 31:46.640 We had people pounding podiums and shaking their fists. 31:46.640 --> 31:48.520 You think abortion is a hot issue. 31:48.520 --> 31:54.560 Just try to build a wind farm in the Flint Hills. 31:54.560 --> 31:59.320 Pete really sees himself as helping wean America off of fossil fuels. 31:59.320 --> 32:02.400 Rose sees him as chasing after money. 32:02.400 --> 32:07.240 Pete, in fact, won the battle in that there is a wind farm on his property, the Elk River 32:07.240 --> 32:11.080 Wind Farm, but Rose won the war. 32:11.080 --> 32:18.120 Governor Sam Brownback last year declared through executive order the creation of a 32:18.120 --> 32:20.360 tall grass heartland. 32:20.360 --> 32:25.920 That tall grass heartland covering about 11,000 square miles is now off bounds to future wind 32:25.920 --> 32:28.600 development. 32:28.600 --> 32:33.560 To be sure, wind power does have its downsides beyond the visuals, and we can debate the 32:33.560 --> 32:34.560 visuals. 32:34.560 --> 32:35.960 I happen to think wind turbines are beautiful. 32:35.960 --> 32:38.240 Other people think they're ugly. 32:38.240 --> 32:45.520 Leaving that aside, there are some real environmental issues pertaining to wind power. 32:45.520 --> 32:51.400 Some of those issues really derived from the wind farms that were built in a very hurried, 32:51.400 --> 32:54.240 somewhat slapdash manner in the 1980s. 32:54.240 --> 32:55.760 Wind farms that looked like this one. 32:55.760 --> 32:59.560 This wind farm is just west of Palm Springs, California. 32:59.560 --> 33:03.880 As you can see, the wind turbines are spaced very close to one another. 33:03.880 --> 33:06.640 Their blades sweep close to the ground. 33:06.640 --> 33:11.880 Though you can't tell from this picture, they spin at a very rapid rate of 30 to 40 revolutions 33:11.880 --> 33:13.140 per minute. 33:13.140 --> 33:18.880 Wind farms like this have been responsible for a disturbing number of birds being killed, 33:18.880 --> 33:25.920 and in particular, raptors or predatory birds, and in particular, golden eagles at a few 33:25.920 --> 33:29.040 of these wind farms. 33:29.040 --> 33:30.680 A serious problem. 33:30.680 --> 33:36.280 Fortunately, today, wind farms look very different and function very differently. 33:36.280 --> 33:39.320 This again is Pete Farrell's wind farm on his ranch. 33:39.320 --> 33:42.300 As you can see, the turbines stand much taller. 33:42.300 --> 33:46.360 They're much more generously spaced across the landscape, and they actually spin at a 33:46.360 --> 33:49.800 much slower speed of about 16 revolutions per minute. 33:49.800 --> 33:54.280 Birds can navigate their way between them, can actually see the turbine blades spinning. 33:54.280 --> 33:56.260 It doesn't mean that there's no risk to bird life. 33:56.260 --> 33:58.880 There is a risk to bird life. 33:58.880 --> 34:02.400 Smart sighting of wind turbines so that they're not sighted in areas where there are endangered 34:02.400 --> 34:09.540 species, so that they're not sighted in major migratory flyways, can make a big difference. 34:09.540 --> 34:14.560 Some wind farms are in fact sighted in migratory areas, and there is a wind farm in Bulgaria 34:14.560 --> 34:21.360 that has used an interesting combination of human smarts and modern technology to minimize 34:21.360 --> 34:23.720 any damage to bird life. 34:23.720 --> 34:30.000 There's an on-site ornithologist at this wind farm, day in and day out, and that ornithologist 34:30.000 --> 34:35.400 uses radar as well as visual sightings to determine when the wind farm should be shut 34:35.400 --> 34:36.400 down. 34:36.400 --> 34:43.480 He said in 2010, a flock of 30,000 white storks was passing through the area. 34:43.480 --> 34:48.000 He ordered the wind farm shut down 37 times in two days, and not a single white stork 34:48.000 --> 34:49.760 was harmed. 34:49.760 --> 34:55.440 There are ways to get smarter about how we manage this technology. 34:55.440 --> 34:58.560 There are issues with bats that I won't take the time to talk about right now, but there 34:58.560 --> 35:03.800 are also smart ways to minimize the damage to bats from wind farms. 35:03.800 --> 35:09.160 A further challenge facing wind power is, well, you can generate it in Wyoming or South 35:09.160 --> 35:15.400 Dakota or North Dakota, but how do you get it to the population centers where it's really 35:15.400 --> 35:16.680 most needed? 35:16.680 --> 35:20.040 The answer is you have to build transmission lines. 35:20.040 --> 35:23.400 Before people get too alarmed about that, I just want to remind you that there are now 35:23.400 --> 35:29.760 2.4 million miles of gas pipelines in America, and we're going to see that number increase 35:29.760 --> 35:33.640 very substantially with the fracking boom that is now upon us. 35:33.640 --> 35:40.840 So yes, transmission is a challenge facing wind power as we begin to develop it on a 35:40.840 --> 35:47.160 very substantial scale, but there is a market for this technology. 35:47.160 --> 35:51.280 Renewable portfolio standards in places like California, by the way, California has the 35:51.280 --> 35:58.160 most ambitious standard in the country, which is that it will be 33% reliant on renewable 35:58.160 --> 36:04.680 resources for its power supply by 2020, which is a pretty remarkable goal. 36:04.680 --> 36:07.520 I want to tell you about this guy before I get to the other challenge. 36:07.520 --> 36:15.160 This is Bob Whitten, and he is a Wyoming rancher, and he has created an association. 36:15.160 --> 36:21.440 It's called the Renewable Energy Alliance of Landowners, or REEL. 36:21.440 --> 36:27.480 This alliance of landowners has assembled parcels of land totaling about 800,000 acres, 36:27.480 --> 36:32.320 and they are marketing this acreage to various wind developers, and the challenge will be, 36:32.320 --> 36:39.120 again, to get the wind from those ranches down into the Las Vegas area and on into Southern 36:39.120 --> 36:40.520 California. 36:40.520 --> 36:45.880 But it's an interesting approach to be proactive in going after wind developers rather than 36:45.880 --> 36:50.600 wind developers actually coming to individual landowners and cutting separate deals with 36:50.600 --> 36:51.600 the landowners. 36:51.600 --> 36:57.800 I'm very proud of the fact that he and his fellow REEL members are taking the challenge 36:57.800 --> 37:03.400 upon themselves to line up wind development that can benefit them as well as our renewable 37:03.400 --> 37:04.800 energy economy. 37:04.800 --> 37:10.360 The other important piece of the puzzle in terms of transmission and how you manage wind 37:10.360 --> 37:14.880 power is how do you deal with the fact that the wind doesn't always blow? 37:14.880 --> 37:15.880 Same thing with solar energy. 37:15.880 --> 37:18.600 You have abundant energy during the daytime. 37:18.600 --> 37:20.280 You have none at night. 37:20.280 --> 37:24.960 With wind, the pattern is somewhat different, but you've got to be able to manage a smart 37:24.960 --> 37:25.960 grid. 37:25.960 --> 37:29.960 You can't simply rely upon the kind of dumb grid that we've been using for the past several 37:29.960 --> 37:34.320 decades where you turn on a coal plant or turn on a nuclear plant and it operates until 37:34.320 --> 37:36.080 the day you decommission it. 37:36.080 --> 37:37.480 Wind power is variable. 37:37.480 --> 37:43.240 Well, there's a good news side of the story, and that is if we were to develop a network 37:43.240 --> 37:50.960 of millions of electric vehicles, we would be providing a storage resource for wind generated 37:50.960 --> 37:52.240 power. 37:52.240 --> 37:56.080 Most of us don't drive more if we drive at all, and in Seattle I'm happy to see that 37:56.080 --> 38:01.600 it looks like a lot of people actually don't drive, but those of us who do drive probably 38:01.600 --> 38:05.640 don't drive more than a half hour, an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours a day. 38:05.640 --> 38:11.200 That means that there are 22 hours a day where you could be plugging in your vehicle and 38:11.200 --> 38:17.400 having your local utility determine when to charge that vehicle and in fact when to very 38:17.400 --> 38:24.920 carefully draw power off of that vehicle to even out the bumps in the wind generated power. 38:24.920 --> 38:27.100 This is not high in the sky. 38:27.100 --> 38:28.100 This can happen. 38:28.100 --> 38:31.640 We're developing a smart grid on various levels. 38:31.640 --> 38:35.600 Various appliances can be managed in this way. 38:35.600 --> 38:39.320 I met with the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and he talked about 38:39.320 --> 38:43.560 a refrigerator as not a single unit but as multiple units. 38:43.560 --> 38:49.200 There's a defrost unit, there's a cooling unit, there's an ice maker, there are other 38:49.200 --> 38:51.280 units I forgot which they are. 38:51.280 --> 38:57.420 He said basically you don't care when each of those different units is operating. 38:57.420 --> 39:00.840 What you want is to know that your beer is going to be cold when you want it and that 39:00.840 --> 39:03.100 you've got ice. 39:03.100 --> 39:04.240 The same thing with a car. 39:04.240 --> 39:09.240 As long as you can get in the car in the morning and start it up and go to work, do whatever 39:09.240 --> 39:15.200 you need to do, it can provide a wonderfully flexible battery resource that can get us 39:15.200 --> 39:19.880 off of foreign oil because this is the linkage to energy independence. 39:19.880 --> 39:24.360 Often people think, well, you're talking about oil and you're talking about wind power. 39:24.360 --> 39:28.160 I don't get it because we don't generate that much power from oil these days. 39:28.160 --> 39:33.760 Well, if we were to switch over a substantial portion of our car fleet to electricity, then 39:33.760 --> 39:38.760 we would be serving that purpose of getting us off of foreign oil at least to a substantial 39:38.760 --> 39:43.400 degree while creating the kind of storage resource that could really benefit a renewable 39:43.400 --> 39:45.160 energy economy. 39:45.160 --> 39:48.560 When we think about wind power, we can't think about it in a vacuum. 39:48.560 --> 39:53.560 I often say wind power isn't clean energy, it's cleaner energy. 39:53.560 --> 39:58.560 Every energy production technology creates some environmental harm. 39:58.560 --> 40:03.320 The question is what is the lesser evil and what is the greater evil? 40:03.320 --> 40:08.980 What wind power will allow us to do is move away from our dependence upon more harmful 40:08.980 --> 40:13.800 forms of energy production, electricity production, one of those obviously being nuclear. 40:13.800 --> 40:19.560 I had a professor in graduate school who taught me statistics and I don't remember much about 40:19.560 --> 40:25.800 the course, but I do remember his mantra which was, rare events do happen. 40:25.800 --> 40:31.480 We've seen, unfortunately, with the Fukushima disaster, with the Chernobyl disaster, that 40:31.480 --> 40:37.600 these kinds of rare events actually do happen and they cause havoc to hundreds of thousands 40:37.600 --> 40:38.760 of people. 40:38.760 --> 40:43.600 They create devastated landscapes for decades. 40:43.600 --> 40:50.960 In addition, nuclear power is a technology that does not have all the pieces in place 40:50.960 --> 40:52.360 yet. 40:52.360 --> 40:55.640 The other day I was trying to find the Yucca Mountain Reserve in Nevada. 40:55.640 --> 41:00.780 It's a hidden reserve down a long, dusty road. 41:00.780 --> 41:08.280 There is no acceptable long-term means of nuclear waste storage and disposal today. 41:08.280 --> 41:14.640 If you read the news about what is happening in Iran, the slippery slope between civilian 41:14.640 --> 41:20.720 uses of nuclear power and weapons production is a very precarious one and may well lead 41:20.720 --> 41:25.820 us into the next major regional war in the Middle East. 41:25.820 --> 41:29.120 Wind power also lets us move off of coal. 41:29.120 --> 41:34.020 To get coal, you create mines like this, open pit mines in the west or mountaintop removal 41:34.020 --> 41:36.440 mines in the east. 41:36.440 --> 41:41.800 Terrible damage to the environment, but beyond the damage caused by mining, the burning of 41:41.800 --> 41:48.040 coal obviously creates huge problems for human health and even huger problems for the global 41:48.040 --> 41:51.540 environment in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions that are going to compromise our 41:51.540 --> 41:57.000 children's and our grandchildren's livelihoods and well-being. 41:57.000 --> 42:02.160 Wind power is not a panacea, but it is a very promising technology. 42:02.160 --> 42:04.600 It's a technology that is known today. 42:04.600 --> 42:07.480 We've worked out a lot of the kinks in the technology. 42:07.480 --> 42:11.840 What we need is really the political will to move it forward on a scale that can really 42:11.840 --> 42:17.040 help us create a more sustainable energy future. 42:17.040 --> 42:22.880 That's what I'd like to say. 42:22.880 --> 42:29.440 Could you put some dollars to some of these farms and stuff like, for example, the gentleman 42:29.440 --> 42:35.680 in that area where wind power is generally unpopular who went ahead and installed some 42:35.680 --> 42:36.680 wind things. 42:36.680 --> 42:41.920 How much money does he get per acre, say, for his cattle or wheat or whatever he does 42:41.920 --> 42:46.140 there versus how much he can get for the turbines? 42:46.140 --> 42:47.320 It's a huge difference. 42:47.320 --> 42:50.520 The average wind turbine takes up a quarter to a half of an acre. 42:50.520 --> 42:53.440 It cannot be used for anything else? 42:53.440 --> 42:55.320 It cannot be used for anything else. 42:55.320 --> 43:01.880 If you have a 2,000 acre farm and a lot of these farms are very big, and you have four 43:01.880 --> 43:06.680 to eight turbines on your property, you're talking about taking a couple of acres out 43:06.680 --> 43:08.440 of production. 43:08.440 --> 43:10.280 Negligible. 43:10.280 --> 43:15.280 The equivalent, if you're raising cattle on that land or growing wheat on that land, you're 43:15.280 --> 43:17.840 probably getting in the hundreds of dollars. 43:17.840 --> 43:22.880 If you're getting $8,000 per turbine, which is a typical price that you would be getting 43:22.880 --> 43:27.040 per year for leasing your land, it's a very real advantage. 43:27.040 --> 43:31.080 You also get paid for the access roads to the turbines. 43:31.080 --> 43:37.360 The core family, which I portrayed here, has a transformer station on their property. 43:37.360 --> 43:43.240 Altogether, they actually get very close to $100,000 for their lease payments. 43:43.240 --> 43:47.680 They also get, and by the way, they don't talk about, it was a secret agreement, so 43:47.680 --> 43:52.600 I'm surmising, but that's a responsible guess. 43:52.600 --> 43:59.480 They also get a royalty per kilowatt hour produced. 43:59.480 --> 44:05.200 They get substantial payments, and it can make a big difference to people out there 44:05.200 --> 44:06.200 working hard to make a living. 44:06.200 --> 44:10.680 Do you think those parts of the country that are now agricultural but are running out of 44:10.680 --> 44:15.680 water could just become wind farmers instead of... 44:15.680 --> 44:18.760 I think one of the things that's appealing about wind power is actually it's not an 44:18.760 --> 44:20.680 either or choice. 44:20.680 --> 44:25.640 You can continue to farm, you can continue to ranch, because you're basically taking 44:25.640 --> 44:27.400 almost no land out of production. 44:27.400 --> 44:32.760 You can farm your crops right around the wind turbine and let your cattle graze right around 44:32.760 --> 44:33.760 the wind turbine. 44:33.760 --> 44:39.000 Yeah, but if the water becomes so short that you can't do any of those normal farming kind 44:39.000 --> 44:42.960 of things, could you still become wind farmers? 44:42.960 --> 44:43.960 Sure. 44:43.960 --> 44:44.960 Absolutely. 44:44.960 --> 44:50.880 In arid parts of the country, solar energy becomes a very viable option where you actually 44:50.880 --> 44:51.880 really can't grow anything. 44:51.880 --> 44:56.440 A lot of the areas I'm showing have a reasonable amount of water, so that's not been such an 44:56.440 --> 45:00.080 issue and cattle are not terribly water intensive. 45:00.080 --> 45:06.480 In the ranch lands I was showing you, again, I don't think it's a trade off. 45:06.480 --> 45:10.200 Who owns the electrical grids? 45:10.200 --> 45:15.440 I know in Germany some people got together and purchased the grids and it was kind of 45:15.440 --> 45:16.440 a co-op thing. 45:16.440 --> 45:21.160 I, in fact, know a person that lives here in Seattle where that's what they did. 45:21.160 --> 45:26.720 What do we need to do here in America so that we can make those grids available to people 45:26.720 --> 45:29.120 who want to put up the wind farms? 45:29.120 --> 45:35.560 Because it seems like in North Dakota, for example, it's very difficult to get wind electricity 45:35.560 --> 45:37.880 on those grids. 45:37.880 --> 45:39.080 Right. 45:39.080 --> 45:43.200 Grids are often owned by individual utilities. 45:43.200 --> 45:47.400 There are some merchant developers of new transmission lines. 45:47.400 --> 45:51.280 For example, coming out of Wyoming, there are some private developers who are banking 45:51.280 --> 45:52.280 on wind. 45:52.280 --> 45:56.040 They're lining up a certain number of wind farms and on that basis they'll build new 45:56.040 --> 46:02.640 transmission corridors that are wind dedicated, you could say, going down into, again, Las 46:02.640 --> 46:05.240 Vegas and over into California. 46:05.240 --> 46:10.920 One of the challenges we face with our grid in America is that it really grew from the 46:10.920 --> 46:11.920 ground up. 46:11.920 --> 46:18.240 That is to say, first it was local, now it's essentially dominated by states and we don't 46:18.240 --> 46:23.560 have a very coherent federal framework for the development of a transmission grid. 46:23.560 --> 46:31.760 We have various associations that try to make the grid more coherent, but federal policy 46:31.760 --> 46:36.400 is much weaker in developing transmission corridors than it is in, for example, developing 46:36.400 --> 46:37.400 gas pipelines. 46:37.400 --> 46:42.800 The Federal Energy Regulatory Authority controls the siting of gas pipelines. 46:42.800 --> 46:47.640 It does not control the siting of transmission lines. 46:47.640 --> 46:53.840 People are working to create more coherent multi-state, what are called balancing authorities, 46:53.840 --> 46:58.000 so that you can actually create a better integrated grid. 46:58.000 --> 47:06.400 It is a situation where the regulatory framework is rushing to catch up with the technological 47:06.400 --> 47:07.400 reality. 47:07.400 --> 47:13.360 Hi Phil, Nancy Hirsch with the Northwest Energy Coalition. 47:13.360 --> 47:21.240 Again, I want to thank you for coming to Seattle and telling really wonderful stories about 47:21.240 --> 47:23.800 the people you met and the issues you've dealt with. 47:23.800 --> 47:31.000 It really creates a nice picture for folks to be able to think about a technical issue 47:31.000 --> 47:32.560 in real terms. 47:32.560 --> 47:37.320 I wanted to make two comments and one question, if I could sneak in two comments. 47:37.320 --> 47:42.280 One, on your comment about electric vehicles, in the Pacific Northwest we've had a pilot 47:42.280 --> 47:48.360 project where we're using water heaters to store electricity, just like you would use 47:48.360 --> 47:51.080 the electric battery to store electricity. 47:51.080 --> 47:55.520 Now they can put a monitor on your water heater and raise the temperature just a little and 47:55.520 --> 47:59.720 lower the temperature just a little and store excess electricity in your water heater. 47:59.720 --> 48:02.560 It's been very successful, very interesting. 48:02.560 --> 48:07.480 People don't know the difference in the temperature of their water. 48:07.480 --> 48:11.120 So again, an effective use of existing technology. 48:11.120 --> 48:18.120 The second comment is about the intersection between retiring coal plants and building 48:18.120 --> 48:23.600 new renewable energy projects and the transmission lines. 48:23.600 --> 48:29.720 There are a lot of coal plants out in the rural areas and that's where a lot of wind 48:29.720 --> 48:32.200 resource and solar resources are. 48:32.200 --> 48:39.720 So we may not need to build as much new transmission as we think we might if we're retiring coal 48:39.720 --> 48:43.060 and putting wind on those existing power lines. 48:43.060 --> 48:47.280 So again, it's something we're looking at in the West and trying to explore the connection 48:47.280 --> 48:50.440 of those two issues. 48:50.440 --> 48:54.800 And my question relates to mobilization and politics. 48:54.800 --> 48:58.000 So you said you visited a lot of the red states. 48:58.000 --> 49:03.640 We find in the Northwest that a lot of our wind and renewable energy resources is east 49:03.640 --> 49:11.160 of the mountains in areas a little less progressive than the Western Washington, Western Oregon. 49:11.160 --> 49:17.000 And even though communities benefit from renewable energy and have economic development opportunities, 49:17.000 --> 49:23.640 mobilizing them to engage in the policy debate to support broad statewide or regional policy 49:23.640 --> 49:28.960 or national policy in support of renewable energy development is still a challenge. 49:28.960 --> 49:34.520 And I'm wondering if you have experiences where the folks in those kind of heartland 49:34.520 --> 49:40.240 states have turned the corner to actually engage in the political debate kind of against 49:40.240 --> 49:46.520 their natural political party leanings to promote renewable energy. 49:46.520 --> 49:48.400 Thank you. 49:48.400 --> 49:54.840 First, that's great to hear the experimentation that's happening here with the water heaters. 49:54.840 --> 49:59.800 And there are a whole variety of ways you can store wind generated electricity. 49:59.800 --> 50:04.360 Another way that is used out here that is more conventional and less innovative is pumped 50:04.360 --> 50:05.360 storage. 50:05.360 --> 50:11.400 You pump water into storage reservoirs and then release that water when you need to to 50:11.400 --> 50:12.400 even out the grid. 50:12.400 --> 50:15.380 But that's terrific. 50:15.380 --> 50:18.980 One of the interesting things I think about wind power is that it really does cut across 50:18.980 --> 50:20.360 partisan lines. 50:20.360 --> 50:23.080 And this is where I think Mitt Romney frankly really missed the boat. 50:23.080 --> 50:28.000 He came out very explicitly opposed to the extension of the production tax credit for 50:28.000 --> 50:29.280 wind energy. 50:29.280 --> 50:34.600 And many Republican members of Congress and governors took him to task for that because 50:34.600 --> 50:40.120 they felt that he was not representing the interest of core Republican constituency. 50:40.120 --> 50:45.920 So I don't think it's really a partisan issue and it has been used as a political football 50:45.920 --> 50:47.960 during the presidential campaign. 50:47.960 --> 50:53.960 But when you really look at district by district, there are several members of Congress in Kansas, 50:53.960 --> 51:01.240 for example, who have come out very explicitly in favor of renewing the production tax credit. 51:01.240 --> 51:03.200 So I think there's hope in that regard. 51:03.200 --> 51:05.500 There are obviously various third rails. 51:05.500 --> 51:10.240 Talking about a carbon tax or any kind of a carbon management regime is something that 51:10.240 --> 51:14.420 you're not going to get people in those constituencies to really talk about or engage. 51:14.420 --> 51:21.280 But I think if you're just looking at wind and jobs and energy independence, good American 51:21.280 --> 51:22.960 issues, apple pie, that's fine. 51:22.960 --> 51:28.800 And frankly, my book was written very explicitly to emphasize those pieces of the puzzle. 51:28.800 --> 51:33.560 It's not a coincidence that climate stability comes at the end of the list because I really 51:33.560 --> 51:42.760 wanted to talk about the kinds of issues that can cross-cut various constituencies in America. 51:42.760 --> 51:48.240 If wind power continues to grow and looking at places that don't have access to hydro 51:48.240 --> 51:57.480 is back up, how much fossil fuel generation will we need to build to provide for reserves 51:57.480 --> 52:01.120 and who's going to pay for that? 52:01.120 --> 52:06.640 Well the reality is we're not going to see fossil fuel use disappear in the coming decades. 52:06.640 --> 52:09.580 Natural gas is very cheap today. 52:09.580 --> 52:10.880 It will not remain that cheap. 52:10.880 --> 52:17.880 I think we've seen the fluctuations in natural gas prices over past years and decades. 52:17.880 --> 52:24.240 My question more is in terms of the fact that the wind power is not consistent and when 52:24.240 --> 52:31.520 it goes down, you've got to have something ready to go and it's hard to power. 52:31.520 --> 52:36.880 I mean, hydro you can do instantaneously pretty much, but other things have to be at least 52:36.880 --> 52:44.120 sort of humming along and unfortunately those other systems only operate efficiently at 52:44.120 --> 52:45.240 full capacity. 52:45.240 --> 52:51.400 So how are we going to balance that out and who will pay for that? 52:51.400 --> 52:57.920 I mean we've got an issue here with wind producers sometimes wanting payment for, I mean you 52:57.920 --> 53:02.960 can sometimes have more than you can use and you can't store the energy and distance does 53:02.960 --> 53:04.200 matter. 53:04.200 --> 53:08.600 So it's not that easy to get things, I mean we can definitely improve, but it's not that 53:08.600 --> 53:10.920 easy to get it from that wind corridor or someplace else. 53:10.920 --> 53:15.780 I think there are various ways that we can create a smarter grid. 53:15.780 --> 53:21.280 One of the ways frankly is to create a larger, more integrated grid so that if you have a 53:21.280 --> 53:26.320 what's called a balancing area that encompasses multiple states, you might have a wind farm 53:26.320 --> 53:30.960 in the Columbia Gorge that is not producing very much at a certain point in time, but 53:30.960 --> 53:34.480 a wind farm in Wyoming may be producing a huge amount of wind and if they're part of 53:34.480 --> 53:39.760 the same general power network, you're going to create a much more even flow of power across 53:39.760 --> 53:41.120 that network. 53:41.120 --> 53:43.560 I don't think there's a unitary answer. 53:43.560 --> 53:49.760 I think we've gotten too used to simple technology fixes, whether it's nuclear power or fracked 53:49.760 --> 53:52.160 natural gas or whatever it might be. 53:52.160 --> 53:58.960 We have to create a more complex, more sophisticated grid that involves demand management so that 53:58.960 --> 54:04.760 whether it's water storage or operating commercial refrigerators or operating air conditioning 54:04.760 --> 54:10.800 units, there are a whole variety of technologies that we can control in a much more modulated 54:10.800 --> 54:16.920 way and that we have the wherewithal to do so because of computer technology today. 54:16.920 --> 54:19.800 And that will take an investment, but it needs to happen. 54:19.800 --> 54:22.200 Denmark is an interesting example. 54:22.200 --> 54:31.440 Denmark has a commission on climate change that has come out with a roadmap to a non-fossil 54:31.440 --> 54:34.000 fuel future by 2050. 54:34.000 --> 54:39.680 And they expect that by 2050, they will be 80% reliant upon wind power to generate their 54:39.680 --> 54:41.320 electricity. 54:41.320 --> 54:47.160 And they'll do so to a substantial degree by drawing Norwegian hydropower into their 54:47.160 --> 54:48.160 network when they need to. 54:48.160 --> 54:49.160 I mean, that hydropower is a backup. 54:49.160 --> 54:50.160 I understand. 54:50.160 --> 54:51.160 It works, but otherwise it doesn't. 54:51.160 --> 54:54.560 As I said, there's no simple unitary solution. 54:54.560 --> 54:59.480 I think it's a combination of various technologies, various management tools that we are going 54:59.480 --> 55:01.040 to need to use. 55:01.040 --> 55:05.520 And we're going to be, for better or for worse, using natural gas for decades to come to a 55:05.520 --> 55:07.520 certain degree. 55:07.520 --> 55:08.880 Yeah. 55:08.880 --> 55:10.080 Okay. 55:10.080 --> 55:17.120 My question is about transmission lines, alternating current, direct current. 55:17.120 --> 55:22.520 Is there some slicker way to do transmission? 55:22.520 --> 55:28.080 Does solar start with indirect and goes to indirect? 55:28.080 --> 55:32.360 I think transmission is viewed as a bigger obstacle than it needs to be. 55:32.360 --> 55:36.200 Some people talk about, well, there are enormous losses involved in transmitting electricity 55:36.200 --> 55:39.880 over great distances. 55:39.880 --> 55:44.680 You can, if you are transmitting electricity over a thousand miles, you're probably losing 55:44.680 --> 55:48.000 about 5% of the electricity over a thousand miles. 55:48.000 --> 55:53.600 And if you're generating electricity basically for nothing in Wyoming, because you don't 55:53.600 --> 55:57.640 pay for the wind, then it's not such a problem. 55:57.640 --> 56:01.880 And you're getting a super abundant resource that you're able to tap and you're losing 56:01.880 --> 56:04.680 a certain small percentage of it along the way. 56:04.680 --> 56:06.600 So it's 5% per thousand miles. 56:06.600 --> 56:07.600 Roughly speaking. 56:07.600 --> 56:08.600 Yeah. 56:08.600 --> 56:09.600 Okay. 56:09.600 --> 56:11.200 Thank you so much. 56:11.200 --> 56:13.680 My name is Craig Zimbrunnen. 56:13.680 --> 56:18.960 I'm one of those people that is doing penance in my current life, because as a teenager, 56:18.960 --> 56:26.240 I paid for college by removing windmills in Minnesota. 56:26.240 --> 56:30.640 And now teach a lot of courses dealing with energy and renewable energy and climate change 56:30.640 --> 56:32.560 at the University of Washington. 56:32.560 --> 56:40.520 I'm intrigued about North Dakota and the Bakken formation and fracking at the same time as 56:40.520 --> 56:46.400 underground, above ground, the potential there for, I think, pretty major wind development. 56:46.400 --> 56:54.520 Do you know of any effort for the people to really be talking to each other about that? 56:54.520 --> 56:55.520 Tell me more what the problem is. 56:55.520 --> 57:01.900 Well, I mean, more, I mean, on the one hand, I see the fracking as a problem we're developing 57:01.900 --> 57:09.000 that really could have very, very long-term negative implications for groundwater contamination 57:09.000 --> 57:11.040 and so forth. 57:11.040 --> 57:16.440 But to get these same, some of the people to talk together, see if they can find some 57:16.440 --> 57:20.400 things in common positive or is it an area of conflict? 57:20.400 --> 57:25.120 Well, I think one thing that is going to happen with wind powers compared to gas over the 57:25.120 --> 57:29.880 coming years is wind power's price is going to come down because the technology is getting 57:29.880 --> 57:31.000 cheaper. 57:31.000 --> 57:32.080 Gas is going to go up. 57:32.080 --> 57:36.120 We're seeing a heyday in cheap gas. 57:36.120 --> 57:41.360 And when I was working for the Conservation Law Foundation, we were concerned about a 57:41.360 --> 57:46.400 number of natural gas terminals that were going to be built in New England to bring 57:46.400 --> 57:50.480 natural gas from abroad because we were over-consuming, right? 57:50.480 --> 57:54.760 Now those same terminals are being discussed for export purposes. 57:54.760 --> 57:58.960 Once we begin to export natural gas, that price is going to go up. 57:58.960 --> 58:05.360 Right now, natural gas in Asia is about 10 times as expensive as it is in America. 58:05.360 --> 58:09.820 In Europe, it's about six times as expensive as it is in America. 58:09.820 --> 58:13.320 We're enjoying this moment in time, but I don't think it will go on for very long. 58:13.320 --> 58:20.720 This onboard fracking here in the natural gas, just the last few years, has that come 58:20.720 --> 58:23.400 in place as a real obstacle to... 58:23.400 --> 58:24.400 Yes. 58:24.400 --> 58:30.280 One real...in terms of price right now, wind power is cheaper, much cheaper than building 58:30.280 --> 58:36.080 a new coal plant, especially with the greenhouse gas regulations that the Obama administration 58:36.080 --> 58:38.680 has put into place on new coal-fired power plants. 58:38.680 --> 58:43.220 It's much cheaper than new nuclear power. 58:43.220 --> 58:45.540 The competitor is gas. 58:45.540 --> 58:50.120 And gas right now is somewhat cheaper than wind, and that's why the production tax credit 58:50.120 --> 58:53.680 is so crucial because it levels a very uneven playing field. 58:53.680 --> 59:04.240 Barack Obama tried to strip away some of the enormous tax benefits to the oil and gas industries 59:04.240 --> 59:06.440 and was shot down by the Senate. 59:06.440 --> 59:14.660 If we can't politically reduce those subsidies, then we have to be subsidizing the right technologies 59:14.660 --> 59:16.240 from an environmental standpoint. 59:16.240 --> 59:22.020 And again, if we can't get to the point where we can tax carbon emissions, then a good surrogate 59:22.020 --> 59:26.800 is a production tax credit and various other incentives for the wind industry and the solar 59:26.800 --> 59:27.800 industry. 59:27.800 --> 59:29.840 I guess we have... 59:29.840 --> 59:30.840 Okay. 59:30.840 --> 59:38.440 You've partly answered my question, but if we were to look per kilowatt hour at the cost 59:38.440 --> 59:45.160 of electricity and say we have a nuclear plant, we have a coal plant, we have a natural gas 59:45.160 --> 59:52.480 plant, and we have a wind farm, getting rid of all the subsidies and say this is the actual 59:52.480 --> 59:58.120 cost of producing a kilowatt hour and hydroelectric, which I assume is the cheapest. 59:58.120 --> 01:00:03.840 But if you looked at all the subsidies gone, what's the cheapest? 01:00:03.840 --> 01:00:07.400 What is the price ratio? 01:00:07.400 --> 01:00:11.400 I think you have to look at the full costs of every energy technology. 01:00:11.400 --> 01:00:15.400 And if you were to strip away the subsidies, you're still left with the situation where 01:00:15.400 --> 01:00:19.880 you're not having the coal industry, having the gas industry, having the oil industry, 01:00:19.880 --> 01:00:21.640 having the nuclear industry. 01:00:21.640 --> 01:00:27.440 They are the full costs, environmental costs of the technology that they're creating. 01:00:27.440 --> 01:00:29.640 We're not paying for carbon emissions. 01:00:29.640 --> 01:00:35.000 We're not paying for the enormous damage we're doing to the global environment through allowing 01:00:35.000 --> 01:00:39.400 our greenhouse gas emissions to continue unabated. 01:00:39.400 --> 01:00:44.440 And if we're not able politically to tax those emissions, it's very hard to say then it's 01:00:44.440 --> 01:00:46.240 not a level playing field. 01:00:46.240 --> 01:00:48.840 Simply removing subsidies is not creating a level playing field. 01:00:48.840 --> 01:00:50.640 You haven't really answered my question, though. 01:00:50.640 --> 01:00:58.640 If I'm Joe Businessman and I want to start a factory and I want to buy electricity, or 01:00:58.640 --> 01:01:04.600 I'm China, anywhere I am, and I want to know how much does it cost me per kilowatt hour 01:01:04.600 --> 01:01:06.920 to produce this electricity? 01:01:06.920 --> 01:01:10.320 Forget the carbon emissions, forget all the other stuff, because I just want to produce 01:01:10.320 --> 01:01:14.360 electricity for my consumption in business. 01:01:14.360 --> 01:01:20.640 Well, as I said, the coal industry right now is not building new power plants because it 01:01:20.640 --> 01:01:23.160 regards those power plants as too expensive. 01:01:23.160 --> 01:01:26.000 So wind is a winner with respect to coal. 01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:30.720 The nuclear industry has very, very, very few plants in the pipeline because it is so 01:01:30.720 --> 01:01:32.840 expensive to build those plants. 01:01:32.840 --> 01:01:36.480 And post-Fukushima in particular, because people are all of a sudden saying, hmm, maybe 01:01:36.480 --> 01:01:40.120 the safeguards we've got aren't sufficient. 01:01:40.120 --> 01:01:45.080 Gas is the big question mark in that gas is very cheap right now, and we're producing 01:01:45.080 --> 01:01:47.120 it in very large quantities. 01:01:47.120 --> 01:01:51.520 And without any subsidies, gas will win. 01:01:51.520 --> 01:01:55.640 I have to say there's a non-market factor that is a very important factor, and that 01:01:55.640 --> 01:02:01.160 is the fact that over 29 states plus the District of Columbia have what are called renewable 01:02:01.160 --> 01:02:08.080 portfolio standards, which set a minimum amount of electricity that utilities in those states 01:02:08.080 --> 01:02:09.920 have to get from renewable resources. 01:02:09.920 --> 01:02:15.880 So that's a significant driver as well in moving people toward renewable energy, and 01:02:15.880 --> 01:02:18.400 I think it's a very important driver. 01:02:18.400 --> 01:02:25.580 Yeah, I was just going to say, what I think you were talking about is the externalities 01:02:25.580 --> 01:02:32.080 of production, and there are many countries around the world that calculate the pollution 01:02:32.080 --> 01:02:41.920 that coal and other greenhouse gas producers into the cost. 01:02:41.920 --> 01:02:48.280 And so there is no basic cost when you have a regulatory framework that says the damage 01:02:48.280 --> 01:02:50.440 you do is also a cost. 01:02:50.440 --> 01:02:56.360 So I think that if I understood right that you were, that's who we're getting at. 01:02:56.360 --> 01:03:03.560 But my own, I have one slight point and one slight question, and the point was about the 01:03:03.560 --> 01:03:08.360 people on the other side of the mountains, although we shouldn't characterize or caricature 01:03:08.360 --> 01:03:10.720 them. 01:03:10.720 --> 01:03:17.560 If they took a little history lesson, they would look back before John Lindsay and some 01:03:17.560 --> 01:03:22.560 of the people of the 60s and the 70s, they could look back very easily to the period 01:03:22.560 --> 01:03:28.760 of the 1920s and 30s at people like Gifford Pinchot and George Norris, who were among 01:03:28.760 --> 01:03:30.240 the key proponents. 01:03:30.240 --> 01:03:37.720 Surprisingly, in Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt, Republicans were among 01:03:37.720 --> 01:03:43.540 the key proponents of rural electrification, and that's a history that they don't know 01:03:43.540 --> 01:03:46.080 or don't remember or don't want to remember. 01:03:46.080 --> 01:03:53.040 So I think in terms of having a public relations strategy, a history lesson would be helpful 01:03:53.040 --> 01:03:56.000 to those people. 01:03:56.000 --> 01:04:02.160 And I'm not just saying that because I'm a historian. 01:04:02.160 --> 01:04:08.760 The second point was to make a distinction between transmission and distribution lines. 01:04:08.760 --> 01:04:13.560 If I understand correctly, this also involves a matter of regulation. 01:04:13.560 --> 01:04:18.280 If you have got a wind plant somewhere out in the middle of Kansas, yes, you have to 01:04:18.280 --> 01:04:22.960 build, it's not a distribution line, it's a transmission line, but it's a short transmission 01:04:22.960 --> 01:04:28.080 line to a national or to a big transmission line. 01:04:28.080 --> 01:04:32.600 So when it gets to the big transmission line, it's not like you've got to build a line 01:04:32.600 --> 01:04:37.080 from Wyoming all the way to New York or all the way somewhere else. 01:04:37.080 --> 01:04:43.120 They can use the existing transmission lines, or it's a question, and this is a question, 01:04:43.120 --> 01:04:48.480 or it's a question of passing the appropriate regulation that allows open access. 01:04:48.480 --> 01:04:52.720 And this is what they do in oil pipelines and gas pipelines. 01:04:52.720 --> 01:04:59.040 It's common all around the world to have one company own the actual stanchions or the actual 01:04:59.040 --> 01:05:07.920 pipe, but the laws permit everyone to use it and not to be gouged for the fact that 01:05:07.920 --> 01:05:10.180 they use it as long as there's capacity. 01:05:10.180 --> 01:05:18.360 So I think what you're saying is we shouldn't over-exaggerate the need to build pylons. 01:05:18.360 --> 01:05:27.040 It's just getting solar and wind energy from the source to the main transmission. 01:05:27.040 --> 01:05:29.400 Am I hitting the right direction there? 01:05:29.400 --> 01:05:33.360 I wish you were, honestly, because it would make my case easier. 01:05:33.360 --> 01:05:39.180 In some cases, all you have to do is create what's called a connector line from your wind 01:05:39.180 --> 01:05:41.840 farm to a transmission line. 01:05:41.840 --> 01:05:43.320 Distribution lines actually happen at the other end. 01:05:43.320 --> 01:05:47.880 They happen from the transmission line to the household or to whatever. 01:05:47.880 --> 01:05:53.240 And that is, for example, the Meridian Way Wind Farm in Cloud County was sited very close 01:05:53.240 --> 01:05:59.800 to an existing transmission line, which made it a lot cheaper for it to go forward. 01:05:59.800 --> 01:06:05.560 If you're talking about opening up major new areas to wind development, rural areas where 01:06:05.560 --> 01:06:10.040 there aren't necessarily those transmission lines, you're going to have to build new transmission 01:06:10.040 --> 01:06:11.040 lines. 01:06:11.040 --> 01:06:15.960 So there really is a long-range transmission challenge that we can't duck. 01:06:15.960 --> 01:06:22.800 It's part of the, I think, development of a 21st century power-generating infrastructure. 01:06:22.800 --> 01:06:23.880 Yeah. 01:06:23.880 --> 01:06:25.360 Just a quick follow-up. 01:06:25.360 --> 01:06:32.120 If there were transmission lines, is it a question of technical ability to carry them 01:06:32.120 --> 01:06:34.400 or is it a question of regulatory changes? 01:06:34.400 --> 01:06:40.520 Yeah, first, there is an open access requirement by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 01:06:40.520 --> 01:06:43.120 in terms of getting onto that transmission line. 01:06:43.120 --> 01:06:47.080 But transmission lines have a maximum capacity, and a lot of them are already maxed out. 01:06:47.080 --> 01:06:48.080 That's a lot of the challenge. 01:06:48.080 --> 01:06:54.080 So it's a dual problem, but part of it is regulatory and part of it is technical, if 01:06:54.080 --> 01:06:56.080 I'm saving myself on that. 01:06:56.080 --> 01:06:57.080 Yes. 01:06:57.080 --> 01:06:58.080 Okay. 01:06:58.080 --> 01:06:59.080 Thank you very much. 01:06:59.080 --> 01:07:04.440 I want to comment and question closely follow this gentleman's in terms of transmission 01:07:04.440 --> 01:07:05.440 lines. 01:07:05.440 --> 01:07:16.640 I understand that there is a very long process for citing and permitting new transmission 01:07:16.640 --> 01:07:17.640 lines. 01:07:17.640 --> 01:07:26.240 I've heard numbers in up to 8 to 12 years for that. 01:07:26.240 --> 01:07:35.280 About a year ago, I was driving from Austin across West Texas and was quite impressed 01:07:35.280 --> 01:07:40.760 by the number of wind turbines I saw out there. 01:07:40.760 --> 01:07:52.040 As I traveled along the freeway, I was kind of speculating on the amount of space available 01:07:52.040 --> 01:08:00.120 in the median of the freeway that is already dedicated to a purpose and is not going to 01:08:00.120 --> 01:08:01.960 be used for anything else. 01:08:01.960 --> 01:08:07.680 What's the possibility of citing transmission lines along those rights of way? 01:08:07.680 --> 01:08:14.160 Well, you often see I was driving through much of Nevada last week, and many of the 01:08:14.160 --> 01:08:16.440 larger transmission lines actually do parallel. 01:08:16.440 --> 01:08:22.880 They're not necessarily in the median strip, but they parallel highways and gas pipelines 01:08:22.880 --> 01:08:24.560 and other transmission corridors. 01:08:24.560 --> 01:08:30.920 There is a possibility to aggregate those different transmission resources. 01:08:30.920 --> 01:08:35.120 I'm not sure you're going to gain too much by literally putting those stanchions in the 01:08:35.120 --> 01:08:36.120 median. 01:08:36.120 --> 01:08:39.800 They could even be buried in the median. 01:08:39.800 --> 01:08:40.800 That's a very costly enterprise. 01:08:40.800 --> 01:08:41.800 Thank you. 01:08:41.800 --> 01:08:44.800 I think there are two more questions. 01:08:44.800 --> 01:08:50.040 Well, while I've been standing here, three other issues have come up. 01:08:50.040 --> 01:08:55.800 I'm very lucky, I think in most cases, to be bicoastal these days. 01:08:55.800 --> 01:09:00.280 Live in Redmond eight months of the year and then four months on Block Island, Rhode Island. 01:09:00.280 --> 01:09:03.560 I know Cape Wind very much. 01:09:03.560 --> 01:09:09.560 I was going to start to talk about public process, but I can't help myself to talk about 01:09:09.560 --> 01:09:10.560 costs. 01:09:10.560 --> 01:09:16.280 I think all of us tend to, those of us that have considered ourselves green long before 01:09:16.280 --> 01:09:23.360 it was PC, we like to think of ourselves as analytical, logical, and we never make decisions 01:09:23.360 --> 01:09:25.160 based on emotion. 01:09:25.160 --> 01:09:30.440 What I have learned is that even environmentalists have heartstrings that get pulled, and they 01:09:30.440 --> 01:09:34.680 get pulled on very often. 01:09:34.680 --> 01:09:40.960 When we see the picture of the farmers who obviously are struggling, and it's part of 01:09:40.960 --> 01:09:45.960 our DNA in the United States about how important farming is, although we are learning what 01:09:45.960 --> 01:09:49.240 can be farmed in cities. 01:09:49.240 --> 01:09:56.080 I'm a real believer these days in generating as much energy where we use it, so we don't 01:09:56.080 --> 01:10:00.040 need those big installations. 01:10:00.040 --> 01:10:08.800 I think there's no discussion about the farmer that gets paid, and the comment was, well, 01:10:08.800 --> 01:10:12.040 it gets paid, the annuity, by the developer. 01:10:12.040 --> 01:10:18.120 In reality, the developer is making a tremendous return on investment. 01:10:18.120 --> 01:10:25.160 That farmer is really being paid by rates that are raised on regular rate payers. 01:10:25.160 --> 01:10:31.280 I don't think it's as forthcoming, it sounds like there's somebody out there, but in reality 01:10:31.280 --> 01:10:35.440 that developer is getting the PTCs. 01:10:35.440 --> 01:10:39.040 The developers are not in this business for altruism. 01:10:39.040 --> 01:10:41.560 They're in to make money. 01:10:41.560 --> 01:10:43.120 I would question the costs. 01:10:43.120 --> 01:10:47.680 You know much more about Cape Wind, but when other renewables are available in the United 01:10:47.680 --> 01:10:55.040 States at 11 cents or 12 cents, Cape Wind at 18.9, or deep water wind that I know really, 01:10:55.040 --> 01:10:56.040 really well. 01:10:56.040 --> 01:11:00.760 I have a piece of property on Block Island if you'd like to buy it and look at 65 story 01:11:00.760 --> 01:11:03.280 turbines at two miles. 01:11:03.280 --> 01:11:07.680 How big is the thumb? 01:11:07.680 --> 01:11:12.640 I use the analogy, I was a former elected official and Dennis knows my track record. 01:11:12.640 --> 01:11:19.160 I was very green, and it's very hard to oppose offshore wind, but I feel like I have a lot 01:11:19.160 --> 01:11:23.520 more knowledge and facts. 01:11:23.520 --> 01:11:30.000 The question is going to be about his comment about who really is paying for renewables, 01:11:30.000 --> 01:11:33.120 and I think that it's very different based on the technology. 01:11:33.120 --> 01:11:43.440 Then I did want to ask a question about public process, because in the Northwest we believe 01:11:43.440 --> 01:11:50.840 in a public process, but when it comes to renewables and the siting of renewables, the 01:11:50.840 --> 01:11:57.160 process is really, as a person who's tried to be involved in it, is very complex. 01:11:57.160 --> 01:11:59.860 It is very exclusive. 01:11:59.860 --> 01:12:08.440 You have to hire utility attorneys and experts to make the case. 01:12:08.440 --> 01:12:15.920 I'd like your reflection on is public process really serving the public and the common good, 01:12:15.920 --> 01:12:20.240 and about the costs, about who's really paying and to what extent. 01:12:20.240 --> 01:12:27.560 You know, when we first got recycled paper, we were all willing to pay 10% more. 01:12:27.560 --> 01:12:28.560 Okay. 01:12:28.560 --> 01:12:29.560 I got the idea. 01:12:29.560 --> 01:12:31.040 But do we want to pay 100% more? 01:12:31.040 --> 01:12:32.040 Right. 01:12:32.040 --> 01:12:38.720 Well, as I've said, I think wind power is significantly cheaper than other energy technologies, 01:12:38.720 --> 01:12:43.280 so we're not talking about a fantastically expensive technology. 01:12:43.280 --> 01:12:44.800 Offshore wind is more expensive. 01:12:44.800 --> 01:12:48.640 One of the reasons that I was very interested in traveling across much of the nation was 01:12:48.640 --> 01:12:55.720 to see wind power developed in areas where it really is almost as cheap as natural gas. 01:12:55.720 --> 01:12:57.800 When I started out, natural gas was more expensive. 01:12:57.800 --> 01:13:01.160 In fact, it was cheaper than natural gas. 01:13:01.160 --> 01:13:04.040 So I don't think that there's some boondoggle there going on. 01:13:04.040 --> 01:13:08.880 We're looking at hard-headed business people who are going to make a responsible decision 01:13:08.880 --> 01:13:13.480 about whether they build a wind farm or build a gas-fired power plant, and many of them 01:13:13.480 --> 01:13:18.520 are opting for wind, not because it's some hugely profitable enterprise, but because 01:13:18.520 --> 01:13:22.400 there might be some marginal benefit to their developing a wind project. 01:13:22.400 --> 01:13:24.840 I frankly don't see anything wrong with that. 01:13:24.840 --> 01:13:30.600 In terms of public process, I'm not quite sure what your point is. 01:13:30.600 --> 01:13:36.000 One of the problems with a Cape Wind project was the public process has gone on now for 01:13:36.000 --> 01:13:37.000 11 years. 01:13:37.000 --> 01:13:40.240 It's not as if there's been a lack of public process there. 01:13:40.240 --> 01:13:45.520 It's been a painstaking process of review and then revision and then review and then 01:13:45.520 --> 01:13:50.640 revision, and finally they're at the end of that road, but 17 different federal and state 01:13:50.640 --> 01:13:56.000 agencies were involved in reviewing that project, and there were endless public meetings, believe 01:13:56.000 --> 01:13:59.000 me, on the subject. 01:13:59.000 --> 01:14:00.000 One more comment. 01:14:00.000 --> 01:14:01.000 Thank you. 01:14:01.000 --> 01:14:04.960 Thank you all for listening to all this. 01:14:04.960 --> 01:14:11.960 My question is, do you think there's any connection between the fact that wind power prices were 01:14:11.960 --> 01:14:17.800 pushing down, according to something I read, the conventional electric prices in Texas 01:14:17.800 --> 01:14:26.160 and in Colorado, and that natural gas prices just went, boom, dropped, at about the same 01:14:26.160 --> 01:14:30.160 time that Congress was starting to talk about renewing the wind tax credits with this kind 01:14:30.160 --> 01:14:31.600 of competition being set up? 01:14:31.600 --> 01:14:38.040 I think there was... Am I paranoid, or was there collusion with natural gas to try and 01:14:38.040 --> 01:14:44.760 get the predatory price down and keep the credits from coming? 01:14:44.760 --> 01:14:51.400 My gut says that natural gas is becoming cheaper because fracking is so poorly regulated, so 01:14:51.400 --> 01:14:57.480 if there are environmental externalities associated with natural gas, we're not paying them yet. 01:14:57.480 --> 01:15:01.920 I think that's part of the deal, where the business sector is way ahead of the regulatory 01:15:01.920 --> 01:15:06.960 process and we're not yet really looking very seriously at what the full consequences are 01:15:06.960 --> 01:15:08.240 of natural gas development. 01:15:08.240 --> 01:15:09.240 I don't think it's collusion. 01:15:09.240 --> 01:15:14.760 I think it's regulatory lag. 01:15:14.760 --> 01:15:29.760 Thank you all very much for coming. 01:15:29.760 --> 01:15:36.720 Thank you.